The State Of Our Open Threads: After Central Florida

First and foremost, I do want to thank everyone for some suggestions made last week for additions to this feature. I am working with some of them and you'll hopefully see them incorporated in time for the conference schedule. Part of why I asked was to address the concern that this feature was not relevant to the Harbaugh era, so we're going to make it more relevant through adjusting the tracking. 

To say that some people thought this was an underwhelming win despite the score would be, well, kind of accurate. Just to give you an example of how that is - the use of "fuck" nearly tripled, as did the use of "shit". Whereas there were a mere 57 instances of "fuck" last week, there were 148 this week, or a 259% jump. The jump in the use of "shit" was only 242%, but both were mostly regarding the same thing - the run blocking and the "hiccups" in the rushing defense. 

Now, on the flip side of that - the three major positive words that we're currently tracking - "awesome", "great" and "nice" (derived from a study of what people say in regards to plays), those stayed nearly stationary, dropping just a little bit from 151 total instances between all three in the Hawaii game to 141 uses in the UCF game. We were definitely finding things to cheer about. 

So, let's do the summary - the total thread size between the first and second half was 1,844 replies, which is siginificanly more than the 1,345 for the Hawaii game. Again, the lack of a dedicated liveblog drives up that number many weeks. Total instances of tracked words came to 742 instances, but padding this significantly is the jump in this use of the "Original Six" words of this analysis from 127 to to 313. That includes a few calls - hopefully in jest - to "Fire" Don Brown, and some amusing instances of "suck", mostly in reference to offensive line play. 

There was a lot of "Butt" action in this week's open thread - like nearly ever other word, nearly triple the Butt action in fact. He was mentioned 28 times in the Hawaii thread, but 67 times this week, much of that in reference to the two drops - which are highly uncharacteristic, I would definitely agree with that. Coaching was talked about extensively - mentions of Harbaugh went to 207 instances from 113 last week. 

The overall efficiency rating is 2.49, which in Harbaugh terms relates to a win with some stress involved. In the Hoke version of this scale, this would have been one of those games that was either a pyrrhic (but real) victory or a rather disappointing loss. One thing that is interesting and consistent throught the several years I've done this now is that we still go to "fuck". We like "fuck". Either positive or negative, we find creative ways to inject "fuck" as a blog. It is dedication and in a weird way, I am proud of all of you for it.

So, there were are - like I said, this is being slowly repurposed to make it Habaugh-friendly but I don't want to lose the pitfalls and pratfalls of fandom, so we're going to watch our language. By that, I mean, watch it appear and usually laugh at it.